One area of computing that is experiencing massive growth is the datacenter industry where servers store information and provide cloud computing processing. As people increasingly store personal information and use cloud services to process and analyze data, large numbers of servers are purchased, installed, replaced, upgraded, and so forth on a regular basis, which is costly for datacenter operators.
Most servers currently being used are built around processors using x86 architecture. The servers include many appliances that perform network services such as routing and switching services, firewall, VPN, SSL, and other security services, as well as load balancing. These appliances are generally implemented using specially designed hardware such as Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (“ASICs”) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (“FPGAs”). These appliances often have only a limited number of high speed ports, and so the scalability of the appliances is limited. To increase the capacity of the datacenter, new appliances are required to be installed, increasing the cost and decreasing the flexibility of the datacenter.
The above-described description is merely intended to provide a contextual overview of current techniques for performing network services using a virtual appliance and is not intended to be exhaustive.